anyonecancode

I don't know about being "in the right" or not, but I do think this comment is correct in showing why it can be difficult, if not impossible, for some people to change their minds. I experienced this in my own family in regards to covid, which made for some very stressful discussions around masking and behavior when we gathered for the holidays during the pandemic. I live in one part of the country, where certain behaviors and beliefs around that were baseline assumptions, some of my siblings in a different part of the country, with the opposite baselines. To change minds would mean going against what all your friends, neighbors, colleagues, etc believed. It would mean pretty significant social distancing, unrelated to the pandemic.

We all were able to work out some measure of compromise for the duration of the visit, but, well, there's reasons we live where we live and not in the same place.

Another aspect of "boring" is note is that ideally the implementation is boring, as in not surprising. Currently working on a codebase that's a pretty standard frontend stack, but omg is it not boring. I wish it was. Instead, it's exciting as in "this function claims to remove items based on a filter, but actually it does the opposite."

I might go so far as to argue that being boring (ie predictable and consistent) in your implementation is more important than being boring in your tech stack.

No -- but NYC is a very large city. So comparatively, Hamburg is small.

City to city comparisons can be tricky because city borders vs metro area can be a bit arbitrary, but no matter which way you cut it NYC is vastly more populous.

Wow, that's a messed up story.

Thankfully I haven't run into very many actual bullies during my career; though I do sometimes wonder if, in fact, I had but I simply was seldom the target (I'm male and white). I only really had one, at a company that's somewhat known for having a higher than average number of bullies. I already had a lot of experience and so was confident and a fairly senior engineer while I was there, so I tried to use that privilege as best I could on behalf of the rest of the team, many of whom were more junior or on visas or otherwise more vulnerable.

I lasted a year before moving on for better pay and less stress (again, a path open to me that's not always open to others). That manager moved on as well, but just to another team at a different location. That didn't do much for my impression of the company.

I don't know what good, if any, I accomplished in my visible and consistent pushing back against this manager. I hope some. If nothing else, I hope it showed my less experienced co-workers who might not know better that the way our manager acted was not ok, and that there are many other companies and ways of working out there.

Coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon.

I lived in NYC for a long time, where space is at a premium. The idea of giving up significant chunks of my available counter space to a coffee machine was a non-starter for me. My solution was a hand grinder, a french press, and a pot of water.

I'm in the burbs now, with much more space, but I've kept the setup because the other nice benefit is the simplicity of it -- though I am considering buying a coffee machine to keep in storage and bring out for when I have guests and need to make larger amounts of coffee regularly.

I've gone through a few grinders over the years, but currently I am using a grinder from [1]handground, which I've been happy with. Gone through a few french presses as sometimes they break, but they're also easy to buy at home stores or coffee shops -- I currently have one by bodum that's been working well for a few years.

The actual coffee depends on how much I want to splurge. I'm not a huge coffee snob so I can get away with the medium-priced beans, eg Wholefoods store brand rather than, say, Intelligentsia or La Colombe (though I will sometimes splurge on those). I find _freshness_ matters a lot more than brand.

Not a big espresso drinker, but one of my sisters uses those little stovetop espresso makers and has been happy with it.

[1]https://handground.com/

At least with streaming we have tools available to mitigate the ads, though it's a constant fight. A few months ago I added ublock origin to all my family's browsers, but recently some of the streaming services have noticed and won't play unless I disable it. I'm trying out NextDNS now. On Hulu it doesn't skip the ads, but does block them, but something about watching 30s of black screen knowing there's supposed to be an ad there but isn't is still satisfying...

Another factor I'd argue is important but often not explicitly called out is the ability of a group of people to change their mind. Democracy provides this via elections -- and when elections become too disconnected from decision making, eg regulatory capture or excessive veto points or other mechanisms or emergent practices that insulate decisions from electoral consequences, democracies stop working as well.

Organizations, be they states or businesses or any other institution, that have a greater ability to change their collective minds aren't guaranteed to always make better decisions at any given moment, but over time they're able to course correct in a way that less flexible approaches simply can't.

Or the River on Which Nothing Floats

(referencing Ken Liu's Dandelion Dynasty, which I just finished. Liu is the American translator for Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem, which has been discussed on HN, so other HN readers might be interested to learn that he also has his own fiction)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Liu#Novels

Oh, that's nothing. Here in New Jersey, we have what my wife refers to as a "traffic theta". Here's an example:

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7957351,-74.3405952,17z

It's a circle, with traffic light, but also still an intersection. Fun!

In the US, states and the federal government are the legal and political actors. Counties, cities, and other sub-state levels of government only have power to the extent that the state allows for. Cities are literally creatures of their state, not independent political entities within a state.

Of course those in city government have a duty to run the city government as well as they are able, but it's worth keeping in mind that cities can be supported or hobbled in that according to the desires of the state. Even states where city and state are nominally part of the same political faction, there is often tension -- c.f. NYC and NY state.

If the city and state are run by opposing political factions, things can get pretty tough for a city. Add in race, and that gets even worse. majority black, majority Democratic city in a majority Republican, majority white state is going to have a tough time.

Don't know if this makes it better, worse, or no change, or if you already knew the origin of the phrase, but:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong

For me, talk about "de-googling" and other such processes comes down to really thinking about what your goals are. It's easy to get into a binary all-or-nothing frame of reference, which I don't think is constructive as for most use cases "some" is still significantly different from "none."

My own goals/use cases:

- I'm unhappy with the current economics of the online world, that are based on advertising. I accept that developing products requires money, and getting money requires a business model, so if I don't like the incentives ad-based business creates, I should actively support alternative models

- I'm unhappy with the intrusiveness of tracking. I think consent is important -- not as a legal concept, but as a regular human being understands it. When I interact with a person or organization, I can meaningfully give consent for their actions. I can't meaningfully give consent to what some third party who isn't part of that interaction does, regardless of the legal fine print that says.

- I'm happy that the internet has become mainstream and people who aren't "tech people" use it.

- I'm not concerned with targeted attacks, but am concerned with opportunistic attacks against my online accounts and identities.

- Yes, "identities" -- I believe people should be able to have multiple identities online.

With those criteria, my current set up:

- password manager -- no reusued passwords. Whole family uses this.

- Fastmail. Because I use email so much, it's clearly a valuable service for me. So it' worth paying for -- I'm many years out from being a broke college student.

- A domain I purchased just for emails, and make use of subdomain addressing. I tend to use a different subdomain email per service. Goes to the goal of multiple identities, reducing tracking and reducing opportunistic attacks

- I've kept my gmail address and forward it to my fastmail, because I don't want to make my personal contacts use a different email address than they have for years. Maybe I'll change that some day, but I'm ok with _reducing_ rather than _eliminating_ google in my life

- FireFox. Also Mozilla VPN, to give Mozilla some money, though in practice I don't really have a frequent use for VPN.

- Duck Duck Go

- Ublock Origin

- Subscriptions to a handful of news outlets I read frequently. Print subscription for one of them!

- Separate computer for work vs personal

Biggest gap I'm still uncomfortable with: Shopping on Amazon.

I appreciate your asking!

I also find the "fire hawks" cited in other comments on this thread fascinating.

Are there any other animals besides humans that prefer cooked food? Not just that will eat it, but will actually go out of their way to get cooked food if possible? My assumption here is that before humans developed the ability to create and control fire, they needed the motivation to do so, and I'd expect coming across accidentally cooked food, then deciding they liked it and trying to come up with ways to make it less accidental, would be an important first step in developing fire making technology. Fire making is unique to humans AFAIK, but I'm wondering if any other animals show any of the precursors.

Had the same thought.

I think one other major difference between biological brains and computers, beyond the fact of having a body vs not, is that biology is analog and not digital. A signal going from cell to cell in a brain or up a spinal cord isn't just "on" or "off", but in any number of infinite states. No matter how many bits you manage to pack into a digital "brain," that's a fundamental difference.

Now I can't predict out to the future and say something like digital intelligence is "impossible" or that in the vast universe all life is analog. But from the vantage point of today and what we currently know, it feels that reality is fundamentally analog and so any digital brain can only ever hope to be a simulation of intelligence.

On the flip side, I think we vastly underestimate the various ways intelligence does and can exist amongst living creatures.

I'm curious what a "mirror test"[0] for an AI would even be. Given it has no body, is there some part of it you could mark, show to the AI, and test to see if it recognizes itself?

What's tricky is that AI seems to only respond to prompts by people -- I haven't heard of any AI that starts conversing on its own volition (something at least one other comment in this thread pointed out). So it seems you wouldn't even be able to administer such a test, as the asking of the question itself would give away the test; you wouldn't be able to tell if the AI noticed the "mark" had it not been for the questioner pointing it out even indirectly. Which itself seems to argue against sentience?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test

> The only real difference between what you are describing and GPT-3 is that your dataset from which you draw all your opinions about the world is unique and comes from the sensory input you had experienced in your life, stored directly in memory. Whereas GPT-3's dataset comes from slices of many other peoples' sensory experiences, stored in language.

So is this debate partially just another way of asking if language is the same as reality? The difference between "things I've experienced" vs "stored in languages" seems... not trivial to me? Both in that I think the way biological memory works is non-trivially different from word tokens stored in computer memory, and also in that I think there's more to having experienced something than it just being stored in biological memory (or maybe that biological memory is more than just "memories", but is encoded throughout the body overall -- a scar is a type of memory of an injury, for instance, connected to but still different from my "memory" of having received it).

That's an interesting take -- and observing how some ultra-wealthy people today behave who aren't even emperors, just really rich -- seems plausible.

Maybe I'm the odd one out, but I feel like the instability is mostly surface-level and FE is not, actually, so much less stable than other areas? I got into tech via web development, migrating further into the backend over time, and about four years ago became pretty much exclusively backend. Just started a new job and I'm back in the front end.

Some things have changed, but not that much.

- Typescript was just getting popular when I left, now it's basically a standard, but 1) after having been in javaland for a while, adding typing to JS makes a lot of sense to me and 2) though it's a change, feels like a change toward more stability, not less?

- React was the big framework when I left, still is the dominant framework.

- There's still a lot of option -- eg vue, etc. nextjs wasn't a thing I knew about that I am starting to learn now. Class syntax felt unecessary to me but seems to be de facto these days. But... these all feel relatively small?

I started in FE back in the days of IE 6. jQuery was a godsend when it arrived, underscore was super helpful. I'll grant the shift from "we use JS to add some interaction, form validation, and sometimes interact with Flash" to "we use JS to write actual programs delivered via your browser" was a huge shift, but since we've made that shift it seems most of the "instability" is more around FE devs adopting practices already common in the rest of the stack.

I think maybe that's where this sense of instability comes from -- a focus on the wide array of possible _implementations_ -- but I feel the really disruptive shift from "interactive decoration" to "web applications" was the really big one, and that's a while back now. And even with the dizzying array of possible implementations, there's obvious market leaders -- you're not going to go wrong by learning React, any more than you're going to go wrong by learning Spring Boot. Always good to explore and get familiar with other libraries and frameworks, but if one feel overwhelmed by options, there's some clear well trodden paths that aren't changing _that_ fast.

One thing I will say is that I do think FE is _harder_ than BE, because the scope is wider. You need to grasp all the aspects of good programming, but _also_ get a decent grounding in design and UX, which are their own disciplines. A backend API doesn't have to think about things like screen readers or color contrast or all the weird ways users will figure out to misunderstand how to interact with your GUI widgets. A UI for humans is inherently harder than a UI for machines. But that's not the same thing as saying that the FE is unstable.

My yard currently has a bunch of maple tree seedlings sprouting up. At first I didn't know what they were and it took a lot of googling "what kind of weed is this" to find out. Since maple trees aren't usually considered "weeds," it took a while to identify these plants.

Anyway, there's a lot of them. At first I was hand pulling them, but after I identified them I realized I could probably just mow them and, once they've had their sprouting leaves chopped off, they'll just starve.

But the relevant point of my story is that I learned that: a) apparently (some) trees really do just disperse ridiculous amounts of seedlings, many of which do germinate and at least begin to grow. b) since I've never seen Maple trees growing in dense thickets like bamboo, I'm assuming that the vast majority of seedlings die off (and in fact a lot of the seedlings are sprouting in clearly terrible conditions that won't make sense once they're just a tiny bit larger -- in shallow soil, in deep shade, etc).

I'm a bit less skeptical that drone-based seeding would work thanks to this, though have no opinion on if that's an improvement over humans doing the seeding in terms of success and efficiency.

I do a couple of things: - One day a week we have a screen free day. I cheat a little as I'll do some checking of my phone, but I'm off my computer and I really am not on the phone that much, just checking weather and maybe one or two small things. But I'm not reading news sites or social media.

- I have an internet cut off rule at 10pm on my router, just for my laptop. Again, I _can_ cheat a bit by using my phone, but I don't really.

The screen free days are actually nice -- I catch up on magazine subscriptions or read actual books, sometimes get a physical newspaper.

> I've changed my mind on deplatforming multiple times, but I think this is where I've settled as I've watched everything play out. Democracy, if we let it function, is antifragile.

The catch, I think, is that it has to be both broad and deep democracy. In electoral politics, this means things that narrow the franchise and reduce participation are the danger -- gerrymandering, deliberate stoking of cynicism and apathy, overly bureaucratized processes with too many veto points that break the connection between who wins elections and what effect that actually has on people's lives, etc. All of this means fewer people participating and government being less and less representative of the governed.

In tech, I think the biggest danger is platform concentration. Arguments over, say, kicking someone off of Facebook only really become free speech arguments because of FB's massive market share. To switch out the immunity metaphor for a different one, we've got a problem where the internet's become mainly a bunch of multi-lane freeways, and the solution isn't to try and build competing freeways, it's to rethink the economic models that have led us to decide everyone needs to go in the same direction with as much speed with the most volume as possible. I suppose the analog to my first paragraph on electoral politic is that, just as the nationalization of all politics has eroded deep democracy, the concentration of platform power has eroded some important and essential quality for healthy online community.

There are fewer wars than there used to be. The percentage of the population for whom violence is not a regular part of daily life is much greater than it has been for most of history. OTOH, when violence does happen, the weapons available are far greater, able to cause far more death and destruction, than in the past.

I'm getting ready to leave my current gig, and have had Chesterton's fence in mind, but kind of in a reverse way -- I'm trying to do some cleanup of confusing code so that it doesn't become a Chesteron's fence after I'm gone. There's some complicated code that absolutely doesn't have to be that complex, and I know that if I don't take the time to refactor that before I head out, some poor developer's going to be stuck debugging an issue that would be much clearer (or may not even happen at all) if that code were gone.

Adding one more thing to my comment -- I think an important skill is the ability to put details in boxes and then kind of forget about them. Eg when thinking about a software system, being able to look at it with the appropriate "zoom level." The shape of the boxes, and how they relate to each other, are what you need to look at. Crucially, though, this doesn't mean details aren't important, it means they're not important _right now_. That's why I picked the analogy of the boxes; you will at some point need to open up the boxes again.

Or another way to try and explain it -- you can't keep everything in your mind's "RAM" -- when trying to think systematically, you need to offload the details onto disk for later retrieval. Don't throw them away! People who are "vision people" and brag about not sweating the details become really annoying to work with as a software engineer -- but you won't be able to grasp the system if your mental RAM is cluttered up with those details all the time.

In addition to the responses talking about getting better with software specifically, I think it's helpful to work get better about thinking in a systems way, generally. There are systems all around us, providing plenty of opportunity to practice systems thinking. For instance right now looking out my window at my backyard I see a drainage basin with frozen water there. I can start asking questions like "where did that water come from," "how long will it stay in that drainage basin", "where does it go when it leaves," etc. Or looking at the next house over and seeing the steam coming out a chimney -- where does that steam come from? What is the heat source? How did that heat get to that house? Etc.

System design is, primarily, a way of thinking -- identifying how given things are actually connected, thinking through how they are connected, what happens up and down those connections as things change. Software systems are just one particular example of this (and, as a bonus, when you start to include non-software parts, such as the humans actually using the software, your software system design will be stronger).

I'm sure others will cite this too, but I don't see it yet at the time I'm writing this, so for a specific book let me recommend Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows[0]

[0]https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/thinking-in-systems/

I think the rate of attrition matters. Too little change and you get stagnation -- you do need that ongoing renewal you call out, and the incentive to create good processes. There is a tipping point though, where attrition isn't renewal, it's erosion. It's the difference between "small fires that clear out the undergrowth and a few large trees" vs "large fires that denude a hillside that then destabilizes into a mudslide."

Always interesting to see comments from people who worked at Amazon. I did a stint, and I hated it, but I am always trying to get a read on if I was just unlucky, or if I can fairly draw a broader conclusion about Amazon overall.

I was actually working for a company that had been acquired by Amazon several years earlier, and I was working on a non-feature team. So on the one hand, maybe my bad experience was that it wasn't "Amazon proper," or maybe the lesson is "be sure to work on software the visibly provides profit and avoid working on software that merely keeps the company going as a viable venture."

OTOH, we were pretty well integrated with Amazon at this point. A lot of people from Amazon proper had transferred here, because it had a reputation as having a much better culture. The vesting schedule was much better, for instance. So maybe I just picked the wrong team -- there's probably something to the "avoid working in a cost-center" lesson.

Then again, there's so many stories of people who have had a bad experience, that being "unlucky" seems to happen more often than seems optimal.

I did learn a ton. A lot of the most valuable lessons in life generally come from hard experience, and work life is no exception. Still, I can't say I'd recommend actively _seeking out_ such experiences.

> The duty to take reasonable steps to mitigate known software vulnerabilities implicates laws including, among others, the Federal Trade Commission Act and the Gramm Leach Bliley Act. It is critical that companies and their vendors relying on Log4j act now, in order to reduce the likelihood of harm to consumers, and to avoid FTC legal action.

Or as the Washington Post[1] summarizes, "Companies that don’t quickly fix the bug could harm consumers and open themselves up to mammoth financial penalties, the Federal Trade Commission said."

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/05/dont-mess... -- about halfway down